Carney: “In terms of Keystone, as you all know, the history here is pretty clear. And the fact is because Republicans decided to play political with Keystone, their action essentially forced the administration to deny the permit process because they insisted on a time frame in which it was impossible to completely approve the pipeline,” Carney said when asked about the pipeline by ABC News’ Jake Tapper.

Later in the briefing, Carney says it is the Republicans’ fault.

Jake Tapper: “How can you say that you have an all the above on approach if the President turned down the Keystone pipeline? And you blame the Republicans for making it political.”

Carney: “But the President didn’t turn down the Keystone pipeline. There was a process in place, with long precedent, run out of the State Department because of the issue of the pipeline crossing an international boundary, that required an amount of time for proper for review after an alternate route was deemed necessary through Nebraska at the request of the Republican Governor of Nebraska and other stakeholders in Nebraska and the region that needed to play out, to be done appropriately. You can’t review and approve a pipeline, the route for which doesn’t even exist.

It’s amazing what excuses they can come up with for things they don’t want, and what justifications can be created for expediting things they do want.

President Obama spent several weeks offering desperately pleas of “we can’t wait” on job creation, so the Republicans took him up on it, and the reply from the White House was “you can’t rush it!”

If the White House had been told the pipeline was going to be used to funnel solar panels from Solyndra to Shangri La, the thing would have been constructed post-haste — time-constraints, cost, and the opinion of officials in the Midwest be damned.

Click the pic to roll tape:

Funny how Carney has to pretend the administration didn’t deny the pipeline because of denied for political reasons.